Bryan Singer gave us Keyser Söze, began the millennial superhero craze with X-Men, and almost ended it singlehandedly with Superman Returns. With Jack the Giant Slayer, he now dips his toes into the current, likely not-as-long-lasting Hollywood trend of the re-imagined fairy tale movie. The delay of the original release from last summer to now was disappointing to some, and suspicious to others, but the extra time gave the production breathing room to tweak some of the rumored bad FX work.
Singer has always been a technically proficient director; what went wrong with Superman Returns was that the story ideas were too big and off the mark, even for a character as mythical as the Man of Steel. But big ideas are certainly called for in this case, and they come to pretty spectacular fruition, even if some of the nuances do get trampled in the process.
Jack (Nicholas Hoult) is a farm boy living on the outskirts of the kingdom of Cloister, and Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) is the royal princess. The film begins with them as children, simultaneously listening to their parents recount the legend of the evil race of giants that live in the sky, the good king who managed to fight them off, and the monks whose sacred duty it is to keep them in exile. All the players in the apparently now mandatory animated sequence that accompanies the setup are fashioned as wooden figures, perhaps inadvertently foreshadowing some of the character development. Then little Jack and Isabelle grow up, and it becomes the basic story of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-sells-horse-to-monk-for-beans, boy-meets-girl-again, boy-and-girl-meet-magic-sky-reaching-super-plant.
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